I suppose at some point, somone will have to find the smallest machine with an ethernet & USB port, some rs232/usb cables and a few real terminals for a real ‘micro’ vax…. Or at least, that’s what I envision… 🙂

Which isn’t too bad, seeing the emulator runs at 1/3rd speed of the native exe.. It’s no wonder that IBM bought transitive, and shut them down. This kind of technology would make it far too easy for everyone to move away from expensive CPUs…!

Now let’s extract the 32bit i386 exe.

$ lipo -extract i386 dhrystone -output di3

Nothing to really see here.

And for the final part, let’s combine the extracted PPC & i386 executables.

And there we have it.. Using this I guess I can try to find versions of Qemu that will hopefully cross build on my machine that I can stitch together so that some platforms (PPC) have *SOMETHING* to run at least…..

Or maybe it’ll help someone at least make a stub ‘we are sorry, nothing to see here’ vs an exe error.

I have only seen one NEC PC-98 in my life, and naturally it was in Japan.. Wiki has a great article, (naturally), basically it was an intel powered IBM incompatible system, that ran an adapted version of MS-DOS localized to Japanese. It wasn’t until the introduction of Windows 95, did these machines die out, as 95 could be localized pretty well..

Anyways, after googling around to see who linked my builds of Qemu, I found this site, by Takeda Toshiya that includes patches and binaries for PC-98 emulation via Qemu!

I understand the PC-98 had quite a following for all kinds of games as people shifted away from the Sharp X68000.. Who also announced last week that they would exit the PC market all together.

This morning, I got an email from Stefan Tramm, informing me of his work.. Basically he’s combined ShellInABox’s vt100 commands, js8080’s Intel 8080 emulator, along with z80pack’s disk format, and CP/M port to provide a CP/M emulator that works in Java Script!!!

YES.

It is that cool.

Now the emulator is one of these new fancy HTML5 applications, which means you’ll need either Google Chrome 5, or Safari 5.. I would imagine Internet Explorer 9 and a later Firefox ought to work….

One thing that you’ll want to do is configure your popup blocker to allow the domain tramm.li to open up popup windows, as that is how you mount disk images into the VM..

Next you’ll have to download a copy of CP/M 2.2 from the server into your local browser datastore by type in:

r 0 cpma

Then load in the bootsector…

b

Then start executing at 0

g 0

Then you’ll be in CP/M

All running in a browser!

So taking it one step further, I downloaded and built the Cpmtools2.13 on OS X, used the cpma.cpm disk image as a template, deleted it’s contents and then inserted the ZORK 1 data & program into the disk image… Giving you a zork1.cpm.

So if you’ve turned off the popup blocker on Chrome, you can type in the ‘dsk’ command before you boot up CP/M. This way you can load it into the disk 1 position (B:) then boot up CP/M and play….

All and all, I have to say this is really impressive for something like javascript to actually be somewhat usable… Naturally a 3Ghz+ CPU makes it all possible…. lol GWBasic users back on the 4Mhz machines ought to cringe every time thinking about the level of speed required to pull this off…!!!!

And thanks to Stefan for emailing me about this!

— edit

Stefan has added the zork1 disk image onto his server, so you can now simply load it via:

So a few years back, my laptop died, and I was on the road. I swung into a Wal*Mart, and picked up an Acer One for under $300 USD… Nice machine, but it’s loaded up with Windows XP home.

Which is ok, for being in a panic and on the road, but wasn’t all that hot for a full time laptop. So fastforward, and I’m looking for a machine to run some low level ASP.NET stuff on, and while looking through my old machines, I’m thinking if only this Acer One could run 2003, or even XP Pro. But I don’t have a USB CD-ROM on me, and I’d like to format the drive, obliterating all the bs I had on there before. That’s when I came across this great program, Win Setup from USB.

What a lifesaver, a minute downloading 2003 from MSDN, and a spare 2GB flash drive, and I’m installing 2003 on my Acer One.

Not to mention I can load Virtual Server 2005 (not the r2 version or the service packed one, that’ll load nextstep!).

This applies to Qemu and real SPARC’s… Anyways, every disk that Solaris uses has to be tagged with a special ‘format’ and disk label for use. When you buy disks from SUN they did this at the factory. However if you go ahead with a 3rd party disk, you’ll have to do this yourself.

Luckily it’s not all that hard.

So in this quick example we’ll add a 36GB disk to Qemu for use with Solaris 2.6

Now I’ve had issues with Solaris 2.6’s format program so I also use a Solaris 8 CD for that portion. I’m going to assume you’ve got all the bits to make Solaris on Qemu work.